
Glass. 



Book 



7 



THE 



HEROIC PERIODS 



IN 



A NATION'S HISTOEY, 



AN APPEAL TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE 
AMERICAN ARMIES. 



BY 



T A YLER LE WIS, 

UNION COLLEGE. 



NEW YORK: 
BAKER <fc GODWIN, PRINTEPwS, 

PRINTING-HOUSE SQUARE. 

1866. 



^ 



<F> 



s\ 






ADDRESS. 



-*«♦-♦- 



A nation is born, a league is made. The one is a natural 
and historical product, the other an outward and artificial 
construction. The one has an inward organic power making- 
its organization what it is, the other is made by its organiza- 
tion as a purely outward adjustment. In other words, a na- 
tion has a true life, vivifying every part, and felt in every part ; 
a league is a mere balance of power, an equilibrium of me- 
chanical forces. Hence a nation has a true political person- 
ality; it has a conscience, an accountability; a league is the 
creature of diplomacy; it can have, at the highest, no other 
priucipk for its inward or outward action than a time-serving 
expediency ; there can enter in its history no high question of 
right, for anything of the kind would be a disturbing instead 
of a conserving element. A nation claims a true allegiance ; 
a league has no higher obligation than a temporary contract, 
which each party may put an end to, with no other consider- 
ation than its own safety in so doing. A nation is an histor- 
ical power ordained of God, and representing God upon earth ; 
a league is a purely human thing, a contrivance of politicians, 
often the lowest contrivance of the lowest politicians. Such 
political alliances have often appeared in history. There were 
the ever-dissolving Grecian confederacies ; there was the short- 
lived Achaean league, the best of them all ; there were the 
Italian leagues of the middle ages ; there have been European 
congresses and alliances of more modern times ; goins: back 
into the remote past, we find the remarkable "confederacy," 



mentioned by the Psalmist, of " Edom and the Ishmaelites, 
of Moab and the Hargarenes ; " last of all there has been the 
Southern Confederacy, beginning to crumble as soon as formed) 
having the elements of weakness and wickedness in its very 
inception, and falling to pieces through its own innate deprav- 
ity, its own inbred dissensions, even when a fierce outward 
conflict was giving it an unnatural vigor and an artificial enthu- 
siasm. It might have destroyed the nation whose life it 
assailed ; it never could have sustained itself. Its brief 
wretched existence shows us the fearful danger we have a ^ 
escaped, the fatal wreck that might have come over the whole 
nation, from the example even of its temporary success. 

Political combinations of this kind have ever exhibited the 
same base features. Products of an evil diplomacy were they 
all. Their history is nothing but a history of faction and in- 
trigue. They have ever presented the worst aspects of human 
nature, destroying social integrity, and weakening the sense of 
obligation in the individual man, by merging it in a soulless 
mechanism having neither life, nor honor, nor conscience, nor 
accountability. They have never had anything great and glo- 
rious about tbem, except as they have approached, or be^p trans- 
formed into, the national idea, or have had a transient honor 
from flashes of glory that have occasionally appeared in some 
of their component parts. In themselves, they have ever 
been the deformities of human history. For such leagues 
there are no elements of the sublime, because there are no 
necessary historical ideas connected with them ; no elevating 
reminiscences of the past ; no proud hopes of the future ; no 
inspiring eras ; no symbolic words and days to call out a lofty 
enthusiasm; no great questions of right; in a w r ord, no heroic 
periods, such as are ever associated with the ideas of a true 
political personality, and of a precious national life. All is 
sordid, low, selfish. Such political mechanisms, if they de- 
serve the name, may be said to have, in truth, no history in 
themselves, or as wholes. It is simply a record of the selfish, 
.sectional struggles of the parts with each other and with the 



embracing combination. This must be so, since there is no 
national feeling — in^other words, no feeling of a common life, 
to prevent it. The annals of such a soulless corporation can 
give us nothing more than the unceasing strivings of sections 
ever disturbing in the very effort to maintain this mechanical 
balance of power, or ever seeking to separate themselves from 
the merely artificial whole with which they are connected by 
no living bond. 

It is only a nation that can have anything truly heroic in 
its history, and the converse of this holds equally true ; every 
real nation created by God, even the smallest and most 
obscure of them, have had, somewhere in the course of their 
political existence, their heroic periods. It is the historical 
sign of nationality. It has been their birth struggle, or some 
other eventful time or times to which they are ever looking back, 
as that which gives them a title to stand in the family of na- 
tions. It is that which gave them oneness and totality, or se- 
cured it against destruction, and to w T hich they, therefore, 
refer as identical with their national life and national contin- 
uance. Even Portugal thus looks back to the davs of Vasco 
da Gama ; Holland remembers, and yet lives in, the remem- 
brance of her glorious struggle for nationality ; and so, too, 
the national existence of Sweden yet derives strength from 
the great period of her emerging from anarchy in the days of 
Gustavus Vasa. It is the remembrance of Tell and his heroic 
time that makes Switzerland a true nation, preventing the league 
character, which enters too much into her structure, from 
wholly marring her noble history. In the greater nations 
this has shown itself still more strikingly. All that is politic- 
ally high and glorious has ever connected itself with these 
thoughts of a national life, as a true personality having at 
some periods of its course such facts of a glorious past, and 
making that past the ground of its hope in the future. 

A heroic age may be briefly 'defined as one predominantly 
unselfish, or as a time when the self-consciousness, both 
individual and national, is all taken up in some strong absorb- 



6 

ing emotion — when a strange elevation of feeling and corres- 
ponding dignity of action are seen in men, and they seem to 
be carried on by impulses that appear extravagant to the more 
calculating temperaments of succeeding times. This heroic 
spirit is not grace, nor religion, but that which stands next to 
them among the moving powers of humanity. It is, in other 
words, the highest thing purely human. Strong feeling, like 
the pure reason, is unselfish, and the heroism of which we 
speak may be characterized as the self-forgetfulness aroused by 
a great right, or a great idea, and grounded on the fact that 
the ideal in man is ever higher and purer than his ordinary 
actual. The denial of this is a mere play upon words. It is 
enough to justify the name that such intense passion, so called 
out, is something far above the low, sordid, consciously calcu- 
lating selfishness of our common life. Such heroic periods in 
a nation's history seemed designed by Providence, not for 
themselves only, or the great effects of which they are the 
immediate causes, but for their influence upon the whole after- 
current of the national existence. The strong remembrance 
becomes a part of the national life ; it enters afterward into 
the common and constant thinking ; it gives a peculiar direc- 
tion to the national feeling; it imparts a higher character to 
its subsequent action ; it makes the w T hole historical being 
very different from what it would have been had there been no 
such epic commencement, no such heroic time jor times. It fur- 
nishes a treasury of glorious reminiscences wherewith to rein- 
vigorate the national virtue when impaired, as it is so like to 
be, by the factious, and selfish, and unheroic temper produced 
by subsequent days of merely economical or utilitarian pros- 
perity. 

And thus we stand in the family of nations. Young as 
we are we too have had our heroic periods, the second, in 
respect to glory, every way worthy of being named together 
with the first. The earlier struggle has passed into history, 
and its character is secured. The critical after-period was 
marked by no compromises, no letting down of the heroic 



idea out of a false charity to traitors, no belittling of the 
great struggle, no marring of its honor by any attempts to 
give equal honor to its domestic foes, no obscuring the great 
truth for the political accommodation of tories who had fought 
against it, no yielding the great right by admitting to its 
equal guardianship men who had zealously opposed its asser- 
tion, no sinking into ignominy the whole contest, on both sides, 
by lessening that great right to a mere question of " stand- 
points," as though it had in itself no intrinsic, unchangeable 
truth as seen from every stand-point. The men of that day 
never admitted that they went through a long and fierce war 
to settle what might have at any time been viewed as an open 
question, or which had not been regarded as irrevocably de- 
cided from the beginning. They fought not to settle what 
was in itself doubtful, and which, therefore, never could be so 
settled, but to assert and maintain what was certain, vital, 
never to be yielded. Such was the temper of the men who 
essayed the "reconstruction" of our nation after the war in 
which it had its birth. No such proceedings followed our 
first glorious epoch as now threaten to tarnish the lustre of the 
second and to deprive it of all its due historic effect. 

It is all idle for the false conservative to say that there is 
no danger of this. History does, indeed, in time, assert itself, 
and the value of the heroic is not wholly lost, but it may be 
obscured for generations. There never was for England a 
nobler period than that of the wars of the Puritans against 
the Stuarts. Its honor is now airain emerging: from the cloud, 
but we know that unprincipled reaction and a base reconstruc- 
tion, under the name of restoration, put the brand of inglorious 
centuries upon the most heroic cause and the most heroic 
names in English history. We must see to it that our Hamp- 
dens, our Pyms, and our Vanes, our civil and military heroes, 
our glorious asserters of the fundamental idea of the Ameri- 
can Republic be not suffered to fall under the same long re- 
proach. Above all must we see to it that the Monks and the 



8 



Clarendons do not get the upper hand — that they be not the 
men to represent us and our history in generations to come. 

There is no need to dwell further on our first great histor- 
ical time. Another similar epoch, still more terrible, is yet to 
have its place and character assigned to it. It is not too much 
to say that we are now assigning it. This present political 
canvass is to determine whether the conflict through which we 
have just passed is to take its place of honor beside our first 
struggle, and to go down to history in company with it, or 
whether it is to be stripped, for a time at least, of all its 
grander features, and reckoned among the inglorious wars of 
faction, differing in no respect from a vulgar prize-fight except 
in the ocean of bloodshed which it has occasioned. 

A war of faction, a bloody mob-fight growing out of a 
presidential election, a base contest between " two sets of ex- 
tremists," each equally wrong, equally deserving the reproba- 
tion of the country — an ignominious strife, "swinging round 
from South to North ; " such is the representation given by 
Andrew Johnson, when he himself revives again these words 
of faction, the North and the South — talking of extremists 
w T hen, in all the proceedings that for long years were prepar- 
ing this war, he himself was one of the extremes of Southern 
extremists, voting with them through Kansas, through Le- 
compton, his name standing on record with Davis, Mason, 
Slidell, Tombs, and "Wigfall, as constantly and as regularly as 
the letters of the alphabet. He now sees things " swinging- 
round," and puts on a par with the extremists to whom he had 
so long allied himself (even to the very verge of the traitorous 
plunge) men who never violated a law of the land, and who 
have been ever foremost in defense of our national honor. 

So, Seward calls it " a civil war," as other advocates of the 
rebellion have compared it to the American revolution. Be- 
tween this and the unspeakable crime of the Southern leaders 
there is no parallel whatever. Besides being for a most 
rio-hteous cause, our first war with Britain w r as a contest 



between a mother country and a far-distant misgoverned col- 
ony. It differed in no essential aspect from a war between 
two distant nations. It was a separation coming in the natu- 
ral course of things, as belonging to the very intent and idea 
of colonization. As compared with the Southern war for 
slavery, it presents all the difference between the necessary 
pains of parturition and the most foul matricidal murder. In 
like manner, Seward's deceptive term, a " civil war," is equally 
out of place. It is designed to lower the whole struggle, even 
as the other comparison was meant unduly to ejevate the 
South. But it is an utter misnomer. It w r as no civil war. 
This term is rightly applied to contentions where two. opposing 
forces in a state are striving in an irregular and violent man- 
ner for the mastery, neither seeking to destroy the nation, but 
each, on the contrary, protesting their superior devotion to the 
preservation of the national life. Such wars have been fre- 
quent in the world, disastrous and bloody, though not wholly 
destitute, on both sides, of some features of the heroic. Such 
were in England the w r ars of the Roses ; such were the 
struggles between King and Parliament. They were not like 
this indescribable rebellion against republicanism. So France, 
too, can find redeeming elements of glory in her fierce revolu- 
tions. For in none of these contests was either French or 
English nationality ever assailed. Xeither party thought of 
harming it. All would have united in a struggle for its pres- 
ervation, one and indivisible. The Cromwellian and the cav- 
alier, the aristocrat and the sans culottes, held alike sacred 
that precious historical idea on which we have insisted as the 
radical distinction between a nation and a base, factious 
league. But in our own case how utterly the reverse was the 
spectacle presented ! It was the very life of the nation that 
was assailed ; it was an effort by the foulest means to biot it 
out of history. This was the unspeakable crime attempted by 
the plotting "extremists" with whom Andrew Johnson had 
been so long connected. For this there were sought the 
basest foreign alliances. This vile league had its still viler 



10 

leagues abroad. Recreant to the name and the idea of repub- 
licanism, they had their emissaries praying aid from Euro- 
pean monarchies, not in defense of, but for the destruction of, 
the freest aud most beneficent government on earth. Meu 
who once sat in the Senate of the United States, men with 
whose ayes and noes Andrew Johnson's voice had long 
sounded in unbroken unison, lurking at foreign courts where 
the very name of their country was hateful and her noble in- 
stitutions of freedom were more dreaded than anything 
else on earth ! This was the utterly un-American proceeding 
of the Southern Confederacy ; this was the unspeakable crime 
of Mason and Slidell, whom Andrew Johnson would compare 
with Wilson, and x\ndrews, and Sumner, and Fenton, and 
Stevens, and Curtin, "at the other end of the line." "What 
crimes have " these men " committed that they should be so 
stigmatized ? What have they done except to defend, most 
ably and manfully, opinions which, whether we call them 
practical or not, every man knows to be in soul-accordance 
with the Declaration of Independence, in most conservative 
harmony with that great historical, document which underlies 
all our republican ideas, and gives us our distinctive character 
amono- the nations of the earth. For lono- vears had Andrew 
Johnson's colleagues freely maintained opinions subversive of 
all these ideas, though holding, all the time, the highest offices 
in the government. But " these men," whose only excess, if it 
be excess, is in their love of freedom — "these men" the 
President calls the Northern traitors. At every railway sta- 
tion the same violent language is repeated. He means by this 
the unbroken loyal party, including Congress and the govern- 
ors of all the loyal States. He means by it just what copper- 
head editors have meant by the same language throughout 
the war. But strangest sight of all is what may be called the 
afterpiece in this dramatic performance. At every repetition, 
forth steps one who was for so many years an honored leader 
in this party, one who gained the name of its chief " radical " 
from those who now assail it. He has no confession to makp, 



11 

but hardly is the intemperate harangue concluded when he 
appears upon the railway stage and blandly says : This is all 
just so, my fellow-citizens ; — what our great and good Presi- 
dent tells you is nothing but the honest truth. Could there 
well be conceived a more melancholy spectacle ? And yet we 
would not forget the great services that this man has rendered 
to the cause of right and freedom. "We will rather tax our 
fancy to invent palliations for his present course, than to 
believe that in the past days of his high and deserved renown 
he was either self-ignorant or insincere. It was not merely aid 
that these Southern " extremists " sought; they endeavored to 
degrade, in every possible way, the republic which Washing- 
ton and Franklin had helped to found. They continually cast 
the foulest reproach upon our history and our name. Men 
now seeking admission to Congress, men lately sitting in the 
Johnson-Philadelphia Convention, were foremost in the plan- 
ning and the execution of these base anti-national embassies. 
A civil war might have been waged and yet each party pre- 
serve an American and a republican position. A civil war, 
had it been truly such, might have had a ground for conciliation ; 
this utterly traitorous and un-American proceeding excludes 
every idea of harmonious action with the guilty participants. 
The men who did this, the men who planned and supported it, 
may have an amnesty consigning them to contempt, though 
leaving to them life and property ; they may have mercy with 
ignominy, but forgiveness naver. We mean national and polit- 
ical forgiveness. They can never more be permitted to sit in 
an American senate ; they can never more be trusted with the 
national honor. This sinks as they rise ; the cause for which 
250,000 men have died loses its historical glory just in propor- 
tion as these men are suffered to emerge from their infamy. 

" Our late civil war," says Secretary Seward. By such 
language as this he would seem to regard it, not as a struggle 
for a nation's life, but a party fight, to be cured by a little di- 
plomacy. The " higher law " was forgotten in his pleasant chat 
with Governor Perry about " Northern and Southern stand- 



12 

points." It all became a matter of perspective. The "irre- 
( pressible conflict" resolved itself into a difference of latitude, 
a mere difference of style, according as a speech happened to 
be made in Charleston or New York. A fight between two 
parties ! Most true, indeed, but who were the parties ? Every- 
thing depends upon the right naming of the issue. It was 
not North and South. It was not two factions in a nation, 
each equally zealous, or professing to be, for nationality. It 
was the Nation versus Rebels. It was the nation on the one 
side, the whole nation, in its total political idea, a republican 
nation, with its national life, struggling with men North and 
South who were seeking to destroy that life, to bury the 
national idea, and resorting to the most unscrupulous as well 
as the most bloody means to effect their purpose. 

It is here that the distinction we have made becomes of 
vital importance, and that is the reason why we have so 
strongly insisted upon it. It at once clears up the issue and 
exposes the deceptive statement. Had we been a mere league, 
there might have been some more plausible ground for char- 
acterizing it as such a factious " civil war." It was, on the 
other hand, the nation warring with a most mischievous idea 
that long had been poisoning its vitality, and which could only 
save its life by casting it out. It was not secession merely — a 
thing which may be asserted or renounced according to the 
expediencies of the times — but that from which secession inev- 
itably comes. It was, we say again, a nation contending for 
its life. What must we think of a man making high claims 
to the reputation of a statesman who could overlook or ignore 
this vital point. It was not North versus South, nor even 
States against States ; that view is the product of the disor- 
ganizing league idea. Even in these rebellious States the 
nation existed all along — as much in Georgia as in New York. 
It never ceased for a moment to be present in every part dur- 
ing the hottest period of the war, the same as before and after 
it. In all these seceding portions there had been, for eighty 
years, the high national jurisdiction, superior to, yet in con- 



13 



currence with, the local, and that, too, not as a government 
over States (as that of States over individuals), or coming in 
contact with the individual only by means of State interven- 
tion, but reaching down through the States, exercising direct 
jurisdiction, having direct power over, and claiming direct 
allegiance from, every man, black or white, included in their 
lower geographical organizations. This national jurisdiction 
was never lost, never relaxed. It was at no time a mere wait- 
ing claim, or in any manner put in abeyance, but insisted 
upon, aud enforced every moment by the most vigorous action, 
until fully and triumphantly reasserted. Mr. Lincoln's oath, 
" registered in heaven/' never lost for a moment the solemnitv 
and the power of its sublime attestation. As became inevit- 
able in such a conflict, the opposing local governments per- 
ished — perished by the very position in which they had placed 
themselves — perished by their own suicidal acts. Unless we 
hold that death may be a part of life, or that disorganization 
may be the law of an organic structure, or that a thing may 
be at the same time in violent resistance and yet in harmonious 
relation to the whole of which it forms a constituent portion, 
the conclusion must follow : The State governments, taking 
this position, perished ; but the nation never lo>t, never loosed 
its hold. This is not metaphysics but common sense. What- 
ever ideal States may have remained hidden away, and out of 
all sight of the actual, as some have dreamed, the assumed 
State governments of which McGrath, and Vance, and Letcher 
.claimed to be heads, were not States that the nation could ac- 
knowledge ; for a State is an organization, a lawful organiza- 
tion, and not a mere geographical space, or a collection of 
people. They ceased to be States — Slates in the L^nion, and 
we can know no other. The lower perished, but the " higher 
Jaw" lived on; the national jurisdiction survived amid all the 
tumult, and when the struggle ended this was the only polit- 
ical vitality left unharmed in these rebellious portions. As 
such it was the fountain, the only fountain, of any future 
vitality, of any future political organization for these disorgan- 



14 



ized communities. The nation still remained unbroken, "un- 
impaired ;" and it was the nation, through its legislative body 
-constitutionally representing it in such action, that could alone 
re-tore the lower and the lost jurisdiction. From it new life 
must flow to those broken, and wasted, and withered members 
of the body politic. Here resided the vis medicatrix from 
which alone could come the healing power. For four years 
there had been no governors in those States, no legislatures, 
no judicial officers whom the nation could acknowledge 
There was not one among them who had taken the national 
oath essential to the validity of their action. It was not a par- 
tial severance, a partial disorder, that might be cured by par- 
tial order yet remaining. The tie of allegiance was broken 
everywhere and in all. There was no political or official 
soundness of any kind, whatever remains of loyalty might be 
found, here and there, in individuals. All was anarchy. 
There was no beginning de novo from themselves. No part, no 
class, had any more light to make any such commencement 
than another. There was no convening power, and hence, there 
could be no lawfully acknowledged conventions. There was, 
in short, no law there except this higher law T , which had never 
peiished. There was nothing to determine franchise, or when 
or how such franchise should be exercised. The rebel gov- 
ernor, the rebel legislature, the rebel genera's, had no more 
power here than the rebel soldier in the ranks, certainly not 
more than the persecuted unionist, or the loyal colored man. 
A military authority might, in the meantime, keep the peace \ 
but the nation, through its once concurrent and never lost 
jurisdiction, the nation as legislatively represented, could alone 
reorganize. Every other view lands us in contradiction and 
absurdity, or would compel us to admit the lawfulness of con- 
tinued revolution as an escape from the difficulty. Ignoring 
the only remaining fountain of law and right, we must leave 
the whole question of future political- life to the mere chances 
of anarchy, with the expectation of something in some way 
turning up that might afterward be made regular by the ha- 



15 



tional acknowledgment. But then it would not be the same 
old State, but a new one, arising in an anarchical and revolu- 
tionary manner; for there could be no continuance of the old 
life but through some life remaining, and that, as we have 
shown, was the unbroken national jurisdiction, once concurrent, 
but now exclusive, because it is all that remains to make a 
beginning, however that which is thus begun might be left 
(after full restoration) to the old power of changing its con- 
stitution as it pleased, and with no other restriction than a 
truly republican form, in harmony with the Constitution of the 
nation. This alone could bridge the chasm of anarchy and 
revolution; for law, as distinguished from these, is a living- 
thing, a continuous energy, and not a mere arrangement of 
dead expediencies. Hence such a course is no less a necessity 
for the dismembered parts, than it is the high right of the na- 
tion ; for lawful organizations can only proceed regularly from 
organizations previously existing, regarded as initiating and 
regulating the inceptive modes of those that follow. Espe- 
cially does this living power of law find its highest exemplifi- 
cation in republican governments, whose beauty and perfection 
it is that the greatest flexibility and diversity may be secured 
without those chasms and convulsions that are sometimes ren- 
dered necessary under other forms. The power of restoring, 
reconstructing, initiating into political life the broken mem- 
bers, resides in the unbroken national whole. That settled, one 
question only yet remains: who represent the nation in this, 
the executive or the law-making power, that is, Congress, to- 
gether with the President, so far as by his veto he rightfully 
performs a legislative act. That question we will not here 
argue. Had it not been for late events, it seems difficult to 
imagine how any doubt could possibly have arisen in respect 
to the one and only answer to be given by any rational mind. 
All this might be argued from the very idea of nationality in 
its bearing on the case before us. But it has not been left to 
abstract reasoning. The express provision that Congress, as 
thus legislatively representing the nation, shall guarantee to 



16 



each State a republican form of government, puts the matter 
at rest. It is difficult to imagine a case to which it is more 
perfectly applicable than that of a State that has broken its 
relations to the Union, and lost its true position by rebellion. 
In ordinal y times it would seem like a provision for whose ap- 
plication no emergency could arise. The great men who 
framed the Constitution are not known to have anticipated 
any such tenible convulsion as that through which we have 
passed ; and their having so perfectly provided for it, there- 
fore, may well warrant the reverent belief that in this most 
essential article they were wisely and providentially guided by 
"One who loved our nation." 

In reviewing this argument we are carried back to that 
most vital distinction, before insisted upon, between a nation 
and a league. It at once resolves the wretched sophism of in 
and out by which our most illogical President, and his no less 
illogical Secretary, have so complicated the great measure and 
the great question of the day. A certain class of reasoners 
are ever fond of what the technical logicians call the dilemma. 
It is so easy apparently. They can turn it in almost any way 
to suit any application, and in doing this they seem to be un- 
conscious how easily it may be turned directly against them. 
A State, say these astute logicians, is either in the Union or 
it is out, or if it is not in, then it is out. If it is out, then 
secession has been successful. We fought four years, and lost 
so many lives in denial of the doctrine that a State could go 
out, and now "the radicals" say they actually were om, and 
that, therefore, legislation is necessary to bring them in again, 
etc., etc. There are many men who really regard this as an 
argument ; and how conclusive they think it is shown by the 
great use that was made of it by Democrats and so-called Con- 
servatives in Congress. It is hard to deal patiently with such 
a wretched quibble. The clear mind of Lincoln saw through 
it intuitively. His distinction between a perfect position in, 
and a disordered relation to, the Union is only a presentation, 
in other terms, of the two ideas on which we have been dwel- 



17 



ling. Tbe bare statement solves at once the boasted dilemma. 
These rebellious States were out of the Union, but they were 
never out of the Nation ; they were not permitted to be, they 
never shall be permitted to be out of the Nation. They were 
out of the union, which, important as it is, is not the nation, 
but the form of the nation, the organization of the nation, or 
rather the form of its organization. This is what Mr. Lincoln 
meant by saying they were out of relation, out of their practi- 
cal order in the nation. But they were never out of the Na- 
tion iteelf, as something lying back of the union, older than 
the union, and that made the union, when it said, " We, the 
people, do ordain and establish." They were never oat of 
that God-formed political entity, that great historical power 
the substantial being, the very substance itself, lying under and 
back of a\\ forms, and whence all conventional, political forms 
derive their power and their only lawful being. They broke 
the Constitution, and have, therefore, no right to name it in 
their defense ; but they never broke the Nation that made the 
Constitution. To return to Mr. Seward's statement of the 
issue, it "was this nation, one and indivisible, that w T as the grand 
party of the first part in the great contest through which we 
have passed. The other party may have any name, or names, 
that any may choose to give it. We may call them mobs or 
states, as we please, or w r e m iy say it was a w r arring with an 
antinational idea, upheld by mobs and States, and which the 
national life required to be cast out at all hazards. It was not 
a fight between two sets of extremists, "swinging round," as 
Andrew Johnson says ; that is simply a degradation of the 
whole matter. It was not a war between North and South, 
it was not a war between two factions in a uation, it was not 
a civil war. All these paltry ideas belittle the contest, and 
dishonor the mighty hosts of the dead. It was a nation, we 
say again, struggling for its life. It was the nation against 
rebels at the South and malignant copperheads at the North, 
combined with all in Europe who desired our ruin, who were 

2* 



18 



opposed to the glorious doctrine of human brotherhood, and 
who hated the very name of republicanism. 

There is a third method of belittleing the great cause. It 
takes the form of chivalry. It talks of honorable foes. It 
affects to doubt whether treason has really been committed ; 
and if it has been, treason, it says, is no dishonorable crime ; 
as though there were no difference between a war of aristo- 
cratic factions in a monarchy and this long-plotted, assassin- 
like assault upon a nation's life — between rebellion against the 
" divine right of kings " and such a diabolical attempt to de- 
stroy the divine right to live of the noblest republican govern- 
ment on earth, and that, too, by open complicity with its most 
deadly foreign foes. In promoting this phase of reaction, Mr. 
Montgomery Blair is the chief agent. He would almost give 
the palm of heroism to the rebellion. They were at least 
equally heroic, equally patriotic in their way, and now that 
the prize-fight is over, equally entitled to come in and share 
in the future legislation of the country. Some who lived in 
the more immediate vicinity of this rebellious pestilence still 
hold precious the national idea. It was with them stronger 
than the sectional feeling, which the league doctrine, and 
Blair's interpretation of it, would make the predominant and 
the higher principle. Those brave men who perilled all in 
the cause of loyalty and nationality were "recreants," for- 
sooth, to the chivalrous, though, perhaps, mistaken spirit of 
the greater numbers around them. The speaker would seem 
to have forgotten that Andrew Johnson once claimed to be 
one of this very class ; but no language could have more 
clearly shown how far this Johnsonian movement, in its 
" swinging round," has receded frem the spirit which actuated 
the nation when Sherman marched through South Carolina. 

According to Blair, there was really no high and immuta- 
ble principle involved. It was a mere matter of " staud-points." 
The rebels, from their position, had some claim to the alle- 
giance of those around them. Notwithstanding the contempt 
they were endeavoring to bring upon everything American 



19 



and republican, they were still, for the South, the chivalrous 
party, the patriotic party, and those suffering adherents to the 
national idea were " recreants." The other side were fighting 
for their honor, the honor of their women — how perfectly has 
he learned the false rebel cant — they were u repelling as- 
sailants !" How dare this " recreant," whom Lincoln once 
trusted — how dare he thus defame the martyr's memory, the 
honor of the loyal living, and of the heroic dead ! With him 
it is a mere shifting of position in the examination of a picture. 
They, from their " stand-point," viewed it so and so, and they 
were "honorable men." We, from our stand-point, viewed it 
somewhat differently, and we, too, are honorable men ; we are 
all honorable men. In this wretched attempt to save the sec- 
tional honor, and to revive, for new party purposes, the sectional 
spirit, how irretrievably sioks the national honor, and with it the 
honor of the countless dead ! As one side of the scale here rises, 
the other inevitably falls. Think of it, soldiers, for your glory 
is deeply involved in that of the cause for which you fought. 
They must go down in history together. Think of it, for the 
honor of your dead comrades, when the solemn question comes 
up, " Who slew all these ?" We are more concerned in these 
awful words than were they to whom the avenging Jehu an- 
ciently addressed them. This vast slaughter ? We are now 
deciding the question whether it was indeed a great right, a 
great idea, involving a nation's life, that demanded such a 
sacrifice, or whether it w T as what the Blair and Seward repre- 
sentation would make it to be, the foulest as well as the most 
inexcusable nat'onal crime that history has ever recorded. This 
is the question, soldiers, and your votes are to determine to 
which of the political tendencies now drawing in such diamet- 
rically opposite directions, the nation's honor, and your honor, 
may most safely be confided. To see this clearly is to deter- 
mine at once how you shall vote. 

Nothing can be more evident than that in all such Ian- 
guage as held by Blair and Seward there is a virtual denial of 
there having been ever any great question of right and truth 



20 



involved in the coatsst. They may not wish so to present it, 
but the necessities of the new Jolmson movement drive them 
inevitably toward it. There was then no " higher law," there 
was no " irrepressible conflict of ideas," demanding such a bur- 
then of national debt, and such a holocaust of heroic lives. 
No ideas have been changed by it. We are again as we were. 
To meet the new party emergency secession even must be 
mildly treated. It must be represented as having been, once 
at least, an open question, with the inevitable conclusion that 
if so, it is an open question still, whenever there is again the 
strength and the opportunity for its assertion ; for force can 
never settle right ; and war should only be for the maintenance 
of an undoubted right, not to settle what was ever fairly open 
to dispute. Besides, the future Orrs, and Hamptons, and 
Monroes, may not feel concluded by declarations made in a 
Philadelphia convention. An open question once whether we 
were a nation or not ! Eighty years of national existence had 
not proved it ; if so, it is open yet, we say, and so is the Ameri- 
can doctrine of political equality, and the religious doctrine of 
the One Humanity. Men could hold offices and take the most 
solemn oaths for more than half a century, and yet honestly 
and honorably hold that such acts created no allegiance, that 
such oaths made no solemn and binding obligation. They 
ask to swear again, or even think it ungenerous to require 
such a test of their present and future loyalty ! They put 
themselves upon their right. Though the war, like a vulgar 
pugilistic conflict, has decided for the moment which is the 
stronger, yet in the beginning there was little or no difference 
of principle. It was a factious dispute, leading to a most bloody 
issue ; but we were all about equally right, equally wrong, 
equally honorable, each equally entitled to come and with " un- 
impaired rights " share in the future government. In the name 
of the dead, we protest against a doctrine so utterly demoraliz- 
ing, bo'.h politically and morally, as this. Blessed are the 
merciful, but truth and right before all things. Holy is char- 
ity, but we debase the name ; we hold up instead of it a vile, 



21 



lying thing, worse in the sight of God than an honest vindic- 
tiveness, when we forget that charity rejoiceth in the truth. 
An open question ! or one that might fairly seem such ! 
What right had we from the Eternal Justice to settle, in this 
awfully bloody way an open question, or even one so doubtful 
that it might be rationally disputed ? How had we been 
lying to the world for eighty years, if the question of our 
American nationality had been open, or even controvertible ! 
If there was not, on the side of the nation, a clear right, a 
great right, a most holy and indispensable right — a right 
which could not be waived at any hazard — then our war was 
a great national crime, and every man concerned in it, from 
the highest to the lowest, from the commander-in-chief to the 
poorest soldier in the ranks, ought to humble himself and con- 
fess the sin of his participation. Above all, how must it come 
home to the conscience of one who now takes this estimate of 
it, who now calls it a mere civil war, yet who may be charged, 
if this view be a correct one, with having done more to bring 
on a strife so bloody, yet so causeless, than any single indi- 
vidual at the North ! With heart-felt sorrow do we say this 
of an old friend and classmate. We appeal from William 
H. Seward of 1866 to William H. Seward of 1856 — from his 
talk with Governor Perry of South Carolina to his speeches in 
the days of Kansas and Le Compton — from his low position 
now to his lofty position then. He was not mistaken. There 
was such a "higher law," however he may have fallen from it. 
There was that "irrepressible conflict" of ideas which he 
would now merge in the lower notion of a factious strife, as a 
prelude to a factious " civil war." Those to whom he held 
this lofty language stand now where they did then, their ranks 
unbroken, their enthusiasm for the right undiminished. He 
has abandoned that great party which he described then, and 
it is no less true now, as representing, more than any that had 
ever existed in this country, the conscience and the intellect of 
the land. If intelligence, education, morality and religion are 
radicalism, they were radical then, even as a false-named con- 



22 



servatism calls them radical now. They have not changed, 
but he stands to-day with their opponents. He is associated 
now with rebels and copperheads, not honored by them, never 
to be trusted, never to be supported by them for any exalted 
station. They can never forgive his " higher law," even 
though he himself may seem to have renounced it. 

Plow long shall we be fooled by platforms and resolutions 
made to order, instead of looking at movements, and ten- 
dencies, and affinities, whose direction cannot be mistaken, 
and which are the only things that leave their mark in 
history ! The instincts that bring false men and false par- 
ties together are more unerring than our keenest reasoning. 
They show an invisible logic of events driving to their con- 
clusions with more certainty than could ever be derived from 
any abstract argumentation. Who, for example, can mistake 
the nature of the movement that rallies every Northern Cop- 
perhead and Southern Rebel, pardoned or unpardoned, round 
Andrew Johnson, and so demands, as an assurance and a ne- 
cessity of its success, this lowering of the great idea for which 
the nation fought, this letting down of the heroic spirit to 
meet its factious needs. It must sink, if they would rise. Its 
grand treasure of lofty reminiscences must be wasted if they 
would come into power. It is this lowering tendency that ap- 
pals us more than any technical measures of reconstruction. 
It is a sufficient argument that those measures must be wrong 
that most require it. We go against that tendency, without 
asking any question about " the policy " connected with it. 
We go with that party which is most directly in the way of 
such a movement, without thinking of its perfection or imper- 
fection as a party, or any charges of radicalism that may be 
brought against any members of it. This one fact would we 
keep ever before the mind : The character of our great ivar 
is changing, and, unless the downward tendency is arrested, 
will continue to change, until the movement lands us in our 
own demoralizing contempt, and makes true the scoffs of our 
enemies throughout the world. 



23 



the dead and gone! the myriads of the slain! how 
keen the pang, how utterly unendurable the thought, that ye 
should have died in such a war as these representations would 
make it to be — having so litttle of principle, so little of the 
heroic, either in result or in idea. Ye verily thought that 
ye were contending for a great right, when Lo, it turns out to 
be a mere strife of factions "swino-inp; round." Your ene- 
mies, and the enemies of republicanism, were nearly as hon- 
orable as yourselves; they had nearly, if not quite, as good 
grounds of right as yourselves ! They were compelled to lay 
down their arms ; they fight no longer, they have thrown up 
the sponge, as the vulgar boxer says, and now we must treat 
each other, and indulge in a mutual gabble, in the Blair style, 
about each other's pluck and bravery. 

The great oath of Demosthenes comes again into remem- 
brance. Ov jtia. tov; iv MagaO&vi* — No, by those who fell 
at Gettysburg, at Fort Fisher, and Mobile, it shall not be. 
This is declamation, it may be said. These are the catch- 
words of campaign orators, there is no argument in them. Be 
it so, and yet they are most rational tests of truth. They are 
signs of those most important things that we have mentioned, 
the movements and tendencies of the hour that to the plain 
common-sense of men have so much more significance than 
any amount of hair-splitting about platforms and policies. 
Mark well, soldiers, on which side in this present political can- 
vass these yet honored names are most heaitily and sponta- 



* " No, by those who fell at Marathon, I swear ! — by those who formed the battle 
line at Plataea,— by those who conquered in the sea fight at Salamis and Artemi- 
siuin." We repeat this sublime pa-sage from a former appeal, for we know of noth- 
ing in antiquity more applicable to the present time. Let this heroic apostrophe 
ring in every soldier's ear as he steps up to the ballot-box. The mere sound of it 
should do more to give his vote a r'ght direction than twenty columns of such argu- 
ment as is contained in the Philadelphia-Johnson Address. Marathon, Plataea, Sala- 
mi?, were fought for Pan-7iellenia, for ALL GREECE. Shall our late battle-fields 
resemble them, or sha'l they go down in history like the inglorious spots, all over 
Greece, when faction warred with fact ; on, under the power of no higher principle 
than a petty 'States rights" doctrine that for centuries made this fair portion of the 
world a political hell,— a warning instead of an example to the ages. 



2± 



neously used, and where tlie least mention of thern calls out 
the most enthusiastic applause. Go into one meeting and you 
will hear them resounding everywhere. They are the staple 
of every speaker ; there is no cautious handling, no evasive 
shrinking, no ill-disguised fear lest they should call up hate- 
ful or disagreeable remembrances in the audience. Watch 
the movements of another gathering; how different the style 
of oratory ! The burthen there, is all of taxes and high prices. 
What sparing mention of these glorious battle-fields, if they 
are mentioned at all! How poor the plaudits, how lacking in 
heart the cheers, even should cheers accompany their forced 
and heartless utterance. It cannot be otherwise. The themes 
into which, on the one side, there is thrown the whole soul of 
the speaker, are felt to be utterly out of harmony on the other, 
and we well know the facts of other years that have made 
them so. As w T ell might the Babylonians have attempted to 
sing the songs of Sion, as a Democratic or a Johnson audience 
exhibit any real enthusiasm at the mention of these heroes 
and the bloody fields where they conquered. Ye remember 
Abraham Lincoln, soldiers. Mark where that noble martyr 
name is mentioned with the briefest notice, or is passed over 
in ominous silence, or only alluded to with reproach. Iu such 
meetings you will hear nothing said of monuments to his 
memory. How little, too, of Grant or Sherman, even though 
some would fain persuade you that those great captains are so 
insensible to their own military honor as to have sympathy 
with a movement that must inevitably reduce it in time to the 
level of the traitors Lee and Beauregard. Farragut is called 
a Democrat. We know not what his former party alliances 
may have been. But mark well, soldiers, and let Farragut 
himself mark well, where his true glory is most frequently 
rehearsed; where the story of his great deeds calls out the 
most rapturous enthusiasm, and to which side in this move- 
ment his fame may be most safely intrusted as indissolubly 
connected with the unimpaired honor of the cause in which 
he so nobly fought. There is, we say, a vast significance in 



25 



this, and our military and naval heroes must be Strang 
blind if they fail to perceive it. The pirate Semmes, • 
robbing our commerce to the amount of fifty millions, not only 
goes unpunished but is elected to a judicial office, and may at 
any time, if the Philadelphia doctrine of " unirap rired r ; '_ 
is true, be elected to and take his seat in I *s. The in- 

evitable tendency of the new movement, headed by Johnson, 
is to put this infamous rebel and robber in the same or a sim- 
ilar grade of honor with Farragut, to make them both pictures 
in some such wretched tableau as was lately got up in Phila- 
delphia of South Carolina and Massachusetts, with this differ- 
ence, that whilst the one case presented a pitiable farce, this 
would be indeed a most sad and humbling reality. Such a 
thing could not take place, or tend to take place, without a 
corresponding denial of there being: anything great in the 
cause for which either fought ; and when this is done the 
heroism of the admiral stands no higher than that of the 

O 

pirate ; our country becomes a mere ring of faction, and both 
stand on the low level of the vulgar prize fighter. 

But what shall be done with the South, say some. Are 
we to remain forever two people, though we call oursel 
one nation? It may be retorted that the strife of twenty pre- 
vious years, bad as they were, did not do as much to make us 
two people as Andrew Johnson's " policy " has accomplished 
in the past twelve months. But we deny that there was any 
insuperable difficulty. There were ample materials for nation- 
ality in the South had there been statesmanship to discover 
and employ them. The old South, meaning by that the small 
oligarchy of powerful slaveholders who held to secession, and 
the league idea, and the mischievous local State rights in dis- 
tinction from the true and vital State rights which it was the 
chief object of the national constitution to secure, or the right 
of each State and its people to the full benefits of citizenship 
and unimpaired republican institutions in every other State, — 
this old South, we say, that was ever plotting rebellion could never 
restored be — ought never to be restored. The attempt should 



26 



never have been made. This old oligarchical South was anti- 
national to the core, and could never have been made otherwise. 
The boldest ringleaders should have met the merited doom of 
treason, the remainder of this class, who had been all active 
participants in the rebellion, should have been content with 
their lives, and an utter exclusion from all political trust. 
They themselves expected no less. Now, true statesmanship 
would have seen at once that there must be other elements 
brought into the political construction of the Southern States, 
even had the absence of other material rendered necessary 
their importation. It would have seen it to be madness to at- 
tempt to bring back this old South, just as it wa«, with no 
opinion changed, and with every feeling embittered by a sense 
of their defeat. There wa% we repeat it, ample material for 
this new element, if the old slave-holding power, the ever-re- 
bellious power, had been once thoroughly put down, and, with 
that fact once known as fixed and irrevocable, other things had 
been allowed unhindered to assume their natural position, and 
had been favored in so doing. Their antirepublican deceivers 
disarmed and shut out from all hope of future political power, 
the miserable dupes, the poor w r hites, as they are called, might 
have been hopefully educated into true republicanism. In aid 
of this, there were the men who had ever been loyal, and the free 
colored population who, on every principle we hold politically 
sacred, w r ere entitled to citizenship with a 1 ! the impartial ac- 
companiments that follow it in the case of other men. It 
would not have so much mattered what particular modes of 
reconstruction the President and Congress might have mo- 
mentarily, or experimentally, adopted, if all had been in this 
spirit, and with this purpose so made necessary by the great 
p'ril through which the nation had passed. Aside from any 
question of right on the part of the colored people, our own 
safety demanded such new infusion of political cements, or 
the introduction of something that should substantially change 
the Southern representation. An ordinary knowledge, too, 
of human nature is sufficient to convince any one who makes 



27 



the least claim 10 statesmanship, that had such a course been 
taken, and zealously pursue J, with the whole constitutional 
power of the executive directed to it, the growth of a true na- 
tional feeling, instead of being slo.v and difficult, would have 
been as rapid as that of the reverse spirit has been under a dif- 
ferent treatment. It is idle to plead the want of constitutional 
power. In the first plac^, rebels had no right to name the 
constitution, and, secondly, in the acknowledged power of am- 
nesty and pardon, lay the power of any condition the execu- 
tive and legislative wisdom of the nation miijht see fit to at- 
tach to them. The greater power included the less, and in 
this simple statement lies the whole argument that has been 
so mischievously complicated. Bnt now the great hindrance 
has been put back again. Instead of aiding the real suffering 
classes, one of which (the poor whites), though guilty, is en- 
titled to our hearty commiseration, every effort has been di- 
rected to restore to power, " unimpaired" power (to use the 
Philadelphia word), the very heart of the rebellion, leaving 
these poor whites in the same ignorant dependence, and the 
white loyalists, together with the loyal colored population, to 
every indignity and every cruelty that baffled rage may heap 
upon them. " The suffering South," was one of the dominant 
notes sounded in the address of the late Johnson Convention. 
As there used, it was that most monstrous of all lies, a truth 
misstated and out of place. " The suffering South ! " For whose 
benefit was this phrase used ? It was not in behalf of the 
murdered negroes, or the persecuted loyalist?, or the miserable 
ignorant whites, but to procure political sympathy for the men 
who had been the authors of all the suffering North and 
South. " The South ! " keeping up still that mischievous mis- 
nomer, which, for so many years, has put a wretched oligarchy 
of less than three hundred thousand slaveholders as a balance 
in the scales against a nation containing thirty millions of souls 
North and South ! " The suffering South ! " There was 
weeping over the picture, it was said. The tears of Orr, of 
Dick Taylor, of Alexander H. Stephens, mingled with those of 



28 



Doolittle, Hendricks, Voorhes, and the extra-member, Val- 
landighara, for the sufferings of the South. The weeping la- 
mentations have been taken up by Wise, in Virginia ; by For- 
rest, the butcher of Fort Pillow, in Memphis, and by Monroe, 
in New Orleans. It presents a tableau casting far into the 
shade that of South Carolina and Massachusetts, as so pathet- 
ically represented by General Couch. If the one calls out 
our contempt, the other excites our deepest indignation for its 
vile hypocrisy, both on the part of its Southern actors and its 
melodramatic managers from the North. 

We have used the term belittleing as the best that could 
be employed to denote the change that is coming over the 
character of our great war, and which the necessities of this 
new reactionary movement demands. It takes the guise of 
charity, and talks foolishly of '* fatted calve?." We say, fool- 
ishly, for no less irrational than unscriptural is such an appli- 
cation to unrepentant prodigals who demand their portion of 
goods with more arrogance than when they contemptuously 
left their father's house. The appeal we make is more espe- 
cially addressed to our military men. We mean not the mere 
artificial soldier whose notion of loyalty never rises above the 
Dalgetty standard — who might as likely have been fighting 
on the side of the rebellion had it not been for varying cir- 
cumstances. We had many such men in our army before 
the war. It was the result of a peculiar training arising out 
of peculiar circumstances. Even the military oath, ever held 
so sacred, and which, of all things, it might be supposed, 
would have made the national predominant over the state or 
sectional feeling, did not prevent the greater part of them from 
joining the rebellion. Of those that remained on the national 
side, some, though they fought well, were just the persons to 
fall in with these unheroic views of our great struggle, because 
the side on which they fight does not affect their narrow tech- 
nical military honor. It was an emblematic loyalty, and they 
find no difficulty, now that the heat of the strife is over, in 
prattling chivalry again, and talking of "honorable foes" 



29 



standing higher in their esteem, perhaps, than the poor south- 
ern loyalist, to wliom they give no credit for an enthusiastic 
nationalism which they themselves, it may be, had but little 
felt. It was only an emblematic loyalty, we say, and they find 
no difficulty in recognizing a principle equally high with their 
own, under other emblems than those consecrated to national- 
ity. They would not sing the "bonnie blue flag," but they 
can hold as chivalrous friends those who do so. It was no 
feeling of the true heroic, born of unquenchable loyalty to 
nationalism, that led such men as these, and the course of some 
of them is now showing it. But they are a small portion 
even of the regular army, the majority of whom were actuated 
by a very different spirit, especially as evinced by our two 
great commanders. Our noble army of Volunteers ! the ap- 
peal is to you to resist this belittleing process now commenced 
at Washington, and attempted to be consummated at Phila- 
delphia. Your honor — we cannot repeat it too often — your 
honor is at stake. Arouse ye, soldiers of Grant and Sherman, 
ye men of Fort Donaldson, Vicksburg, and Lookout Mountain. 
Carry your minds forward to the period w T hen ye shall be old 
men. Think of your own children asking you about these 
battle-fields as your fathers inquired of their fathers about 
Bunker Hill and Saratoga. Do you wish the scenes of peril 
where you faced death for what you truly felt to be a great 
cause, and a great question of right, to go down to history 
with the same lofty remembrance, the same untarnished char- 
acter of heroism ? Then bear in mind that events now passing 
are to decide, that the present political struggle is to decide, 
that your votes are to decide, the momentous question in 
in which you and your children have so deep an interest. Are 
you at any loss in regard to your ballot, then lay aside all the 
politician's quibbles about in and out of the Union, and sim- 
ply look to movements and tendencies. See in what direction 
they are hastening. Ask of your own common-sense — with 
which party, as they are now marshalling, does this great 
question of the national honor, and of your honor, and of the 



10 



battle-fields in which you have fought and in which your com- 
rades died, lie most to heart, — to whose keeping their glory 
may be safely intrusted ? Who make these appeals to you ? 
There is vast significance, we say again, in that. And on 
which side is there the most cautious reserve if not the most 
ominous silence, in respect to all that inspired your souls in 
the hours of danger and of death ? Do you find the ideas 
and the feelings that then possessed you represented in the 
Philadelphia-Johnson Convention ? Can you support a move- 
ment that calls out the rapturous assent of such unrepentant 
rebels as Hampton of South Carolina, of Forrest of Fort Pil- 
low, and Monroe of New Orleans? Can you vote just as 
they would have you ? After all your hard-fought battles, 
after all your heroic sacrifices, can you be even indifferent to a 
tendency which, by giving a low character to our national 
war, can only end by putting Grant on a level with Lee, and 
Sherman with Hood, and making the dead of Andersonville 
of no higher account than the drowned pirates of the Ala- 
bama ? "What would the world have thought; where would 
have been our remembrances of our fathers if they had 
proceeded in this manner after our first heroic struggle ? 
Suppose that Tories had been immediately received into Con- 
gress, or had even been allowed in some places a greater rep- 
resentation ! Their course was resistance to the establishment 
of a Republican government when old ideas so strongly led 
the other way ; the unspeakable atrocity of the Southern 
conspiracy consisted in its being an attempt to destroy a re- 
publican nation after eighty years vigorous life, and the most 
beneficent rule that earth had ever witnessed. It was a crime 
which has no parallel in the history of man. Shall these men 
ever again sit in an American Congress? Shall they make 
laws, or assist in making laws for you and your children ? 
This is the great issue of the present canvass. See to it that 
no foolish cry of " radicalism, " no sophims about " policies " 
and reconstruction, prevent you from looking it steadily in the 
face. On yo.u, soldiers, above all other men, devolves the duty 



31 



of so guarding the remembrance of the past five years, that no 
subsequent events may be allowed to cast the least shadow 
upon their sublime heroism. 

A heroic period, it may be repeated, is one characterized 
by a predominant unselfishness. The higher attributes of hu- 
manity come out, the lower for a season disappear. There 
may be a counterfeit of this ; but the test of its genuineness is 
the presence and the impulse of a great idea, of a great right, 
rousing us out of our ordinary indifference. Such was the 
time through which we have passed. There was romance in 
it, but romance is not always unreality. The heroic feeling 
could be seen in the slightest as well as in the greatest events. 
It poured itself out in national hymns and songs. It had its 
poetry, some of it poor poetry, indeed, and having all grades 
of excellence, from the lyre of Whittier to the extemporized 
ballad of the camp, but all precious as showing the one strong- 
inspiration. It appeared in a hundred ways that at other times 
we should have regarded as mythical exaggerations. There 
came again in reality stories that we had heard of only as ro- 
mantic fictions, or hio-hlv colored facts of the older times — 
mothers offering their children, as had been done in ancient 
Sparta, and during our first war with Britain, — the wife bid- 
ding the husband go forth to the conflict, the maiden, her 
lover ; young children with difficulty restrained at home, and 
cases not unfrequent of the merest boys falling on the battle- 
field. Every one must remember how our newspapers abounded 
in such acoounts — oue class of newspapers we mean ; for in all 
this, those that now support " the policy" were as silent as the 
grave. Exaggeration there may have been in many cases, and 
yet as a whole falling short of the reality, — assuming the uncon- 
scious coloring of the mythical, and yet inadequate as a picture 
of the truly grand and heroic in the spirit of the times. 

This heroic period of ours elevated us by showing us to 
ourselves in a light we hardly could have imagined before ; 
and now T that the scum again is rising, and the vile in politics 
is coming forth, we are in a condition to measure it by the 



contrast. Who would have thought ten years ago that such 
armies could have been raised in such a way, and of such 
material ? But then the inspiring, the unselfish idea, had not 
come, and there was little or nothing in our history for half a 
century past to aid the imagination in conceiving it. We 
could not then understand the power of a great and heroic im- 
pulse as arising out of a great question touching our national 
life. We would have deemed it impossible that our old men, 
our young men, our women, our children, should be possessed 
by such a spirit, so putting down, and putting out of sight, 
the ordinary low selfishness of common times. Oh, our 
heroic boys ! Who could have thought it ? Never can the 
writer forget one touching scene in his morning lecture-room. 
It was in the third year of the war. Many before had gone 
from the institution ; the oldest son of one member of the 
faculty had given his life early in the conflict ; one of its most 
accomplished Professors had left the college to form a regi- 
ment, at whose head he afterward fell in the bloody field of 
Chancellorville. But there came another call ; and on the 
morning referred to, out of a class-divison of thirty there were 
eight places silent at the calling of the roll. Their occupants 
had given their names to a regiment destined for Port Hud- 
son. They endured the severest hardship of the camp and the 
battle-field as manfully and as cheerfully as they had ever 
sported on the college green. Some of them never came back. 
Among these was the prize scholar, the beloved of his class, 
the only son of his mother. He sleeps by Port Hudson, his 
grave trampled upon by insolent rebels, but often visited, per- 
haps, and strewed w T ith flowers and tears by the loyal son of 
Africa. Oh, those noble boys, w r orthy of all the renow r n they 
had ever read of on the classic page ! It comes over me some- 
times in a feeling of unbelieving wonder. Were these heroes ■ 
of the fiercest battle-fields indeed the same young lads whose 
familiar faces had so often been before me in the lecture-room 
— those playful boys, so fond of mingling sport with study 
and whom I had so often chided for their mirth-loving irregu- 



33 



larities ? As I think of those young dead faces lying- in the 
trench, or among- the blackened ruins of the mine, there 
comes up a feeling of repentance that, like a croaking senior, I 
should have ever talked to them of the degeneracy of the ago 
Those noble boys! How soon did the times bring them up 
not merely to manhood — that false manhood to which we are 
too apt to hurry in the low selfishness of ordinary life — but to 
the fullest stature of the most heroic humanity ! From the 
older o-raduates of the college more than three hundred went 
forth, filling all grades, from the general to the private, whilst 
from larger institutions they mustered in still greater num- 
bers. 

And so it was all over the land. But why give these sta- 
tistics ? What bearing have they on the present political 
argument ? Much every way. Takeu in connection with 
other facts of a similar kind, they show how much higher a 
thing than any fictitious romance was the spirit and the 
solemn verity of the time we call heroic. They show how 
remarkably the four years, from 1861 to I860, stand out 
above all other years in our history, since the period that 
made us a nation. They excuse us from a formal definition of 
heroism. We have the thing itself, the fact, before us. They 
evince how T great must have been that question, how lofty that 
idea, which lifted up tlie nation to such a hight. But most 
of all does it show how deeply disastrous, not only to the 
future political prosperity of our beloved land, but to that 
higher thing, its spiritual health, is the undervaluing tendency 
already remarked upon, although it may ever so much take to 
itself the form of charity, whilst it so utterly ignores that up- 
holding of the right and true which alone can give our com- 
miseration of the vanquished auy real or substantial value. 
•But take whatever guise it will, it has always the same unmis- 
takable tendency. Johnson's "swinging round," and Seward's 
talk of "civil war" and " fatted calves," and Blair's " chiv- 
alry," have no other aim nor meaning. The notions that un- 
derlie all such affected phraseology, much more the falsehood 



34 



that there is in their putting forth, are directly dimming that 
high sense of right itl which the true heroic has its aliment, 
and on the guarding of which the political and the national 
well-being so much depends. It is not the North alone that 
suffers by it. These things have done, and are now doing, 
more to hurt the South than all the suffering caused by Sher- 
man's army, or any subjugation of which the most malignant 
copperhead ever dreamed. 

Incalculable is the political evil of transforming, in any 
way, the character of this glorious period into the reverse 
picture of a strife between contending political parties, the 
merit or demerit of which is nearly on a par, whose battle- 
fields and monumental places are to be regarded as equally 
honored, and, therefore, by an inevitable necessity in our 
thinking, equally inglorious — such as the whole conflict must 
become, on both sides, if these representations be correct — 
making us the scoff of the world, and a dishonor among the 
nations. The bare statement would seem to b? the only argu- 
ment required. Instead of a traitorous rebellion subdued, 
with all the legitimate following^ of such an act, a mere mis- 
understanding, or a factious " civil war," settled by an under- 
standing, if not a formal paper treaty, — no terms imposed, no 
rights impaired ! We cannot conceive of anything more dis- 
organizing or destructive that could be incorporated into our 
history ; and yet the men who favor this would dare to call 
themselves Conservatives ! 

If the view of Seward be correct, then this may be our 
first civil war, but it will by no means be our last. If there 
be nothing to lift it out of this low category, and put it where 
it shall have no future imitation — making it a grand excep- 
tional event, with those high marks of difference to which we 
have alluded — then may we expect it to be often repeatel.- 
The example once set of such an attempt, with such an im- 
punity, it will come over and over again, as often as favoring 
circumstances occur. An assassination, a change of execu- 
tive, a heavy burtheu of debt on the one side, or a capacity 



35 



(arising out of a wild state of society) to fight without money 
or credit on the other, may bring such favoring circumstances 
sooner than we expect. The thought of a great right once 
gone and the Blair conception taking its place, the true heroic 
impulse waning and the false chivalry come again, the bright 
national idea becoming dim and the mischievous league fal- 
lacy — such a favorite ever with the smallest of politicians — 
taking anew possession of the mind, — we may expect our 
history, in spite of oaths and written constitutions, to be but a 
repetition of that of the factious States of Greece, and of the 
Italians of the middle ages. 

There is nothing to prevent such a result except the his- 
torical hallowing of this time, and setting the brand of ever- 
lasting infamy, if not the mark of death and confiscation, on 
this one desperate attempt at the national life, so excelling in 
the enormity of its wickedness everything called revolution, 
civil war, or rebellion in any land less free, less happy than 
our own. There must be a difference made between our war 
and all these. Set \U glory now so high that it shall be 
lowered never. Let it be so photographed in the soul of the 
nation that its bright features shall be never dimmed or lost. 
Let it be embalmed in the fragrant odors of memory, beyond 
all reach of harm or decay. This is the present work, de 
manding no less of struggle, no less of heroism than the war 
itself. It is this which makes the canvass of 1866 of such 
incalculable importance. Such is the question, Foldiers, to be 
decided by your ballots, as before by your bullets. Resolve 
that it shall be decided right, and no further argument need 
to be addressed to you as to the side on which those ballots 
shall be cast. 

Such a decision we owe to the political virtue of the liv- 
ing. AVc owe it to the 250,000 dead, the value of whose 
lives cannot be estimated ; for we may safely say that they 
were among our noblest lives. It was the noblest who were 
most likely to fall. The brave living who shared their peril 
will be the last to regard this testimony to their fallen 



36 



comrades as any disparagement to themselves. 'Twas sung of 
old by Sophoc'es — 

liovrjpbv obdev 1 , aXla tovq Xp?](7TGvg cici 
War takes the noblest ever. 

In the drama of " Philoctetes," the wounded chieftain on the 
desert isle is asking news from Troy. Where is Achilles ? 
Dead. And where's Patroclus ? Dead. And Ajax, then, and 
Nestor's noble son Antilochus ? All dead and gone. 

Phi. And where's that man of double tongue, 

Subtle and plausible \ 
Neo. Ulysses lives ! 

Phi. Theresites, too ? that busy demagogue ? 
Neo. They are living still, I hear. 
Phi. Aye; aye; 

I do not doubt it. Evil never dies. 

The fraudful and the vile live on ; the brave. 

They dwell in Hades. 

It has a heathen air, but there is a likeness yet in the old 
poet's limning. Its vivid outlines are still suggestive of men 
and things near by us. ' ; Subtle and plausible," yl&oor^ je 
deivbg v.al ooqog — there is no mistaking the modem counter- 
parts. Ajax and Patroclus dead ; Ulysses and Thersites still 
living. The martyr Lincoln slain, the noble "Wadsworth 
lying in his bloody grave; Lyons among the dead, — M'Pher- 
son, Sedgwick, Reynolds, Pieno, Mansfield, Kearney, with a 
host more that would fill pages should we name them, — these 
all gone ; the plotting politicians at Philadelphia sitting in 
conclave w 7 ith surviving traitors from the South, the venomous 
Copperheads, the men of emblematic loyalty, all left behind, 
to make new compromises, to break the nation's solemn 
pledge — in a "word, to soothe rebellion, and, in so doing, de- 
preciate that high right, that solemn cause of national life for 
which these glorious heroes fell. 



37 



Such depreciation must be the inevitable result of any far- 
ther progress in this oblique and downward direction. Al- 
ready has President Johnson put it out of his power to " make 
treason odious," as far as he is concerned. Already has he 
put it out of his power to punish it at all, even in its highest 
representative. The traitors, indeed, are too numerous to 
make the highest punishment of all, by the ordinary process 
of law, either possible or desirable ; but events have taken 
place that, without change, put it out of the question in re- 
spect to every one. The mere pardon, with life and prop- 
erty, given to one distinguished rebel, would not, of itself, be 
in the way of the punishment of another ; but to pardon such 
a one, with the express purpose of making him governor of a 
State, or the mayor of a principal city, and that, too, within a 
few months after the laying down of their rebellious arm-. 
makes all punishment of others impossible, unless all such pro- 
ceedings are wholly cancelled and reversed. Humphrey in 
the gubernatorial chair of Mississippi, Monroe chief magistrate 
of New Orleans, Stephens in the Senate, Orr and Wise in 
Congress, and Davis on the gallows ! Guilty as he is, guilty 
as they all are, we could not bear the inconsistency. Some 
rebels may be punished whilst some are pardoned ; but we 
cannot admit some to seats in Congress and make an example 
of any. Such an act of admission is a complete cancelling of 
the crime of all. It is equivalent to a solemn decision, that 
there is, in fact, no crime in assailing our national life. 1 
only a difference of opinion, a viewing things from another 
standpoint, and, therefore, perfectly compatible with moral 
aud political integrity. 

A striking illustration of this is furnished by a -ingle 
notorious case. There was present as one of the delegates t" 
the Philadelphia Convention, General Dick Taylor, as he is 
called. He, as well as Orr, of South Carolina, was very fond 
of the phrase, " fellow-citizens." We know not whether he 
has received an official pardon, but it would not have been re- 
garded there a- of much consequence, either in excluding or 



38 



in admitting this destructive rebel to that most conservative 
body. He was allowed to come among them and talk of fel- 
low-citizens. Now, this confederate Gen. Taylor, had put to 
death, at one time, by the most cruel and ignominous mode 
of hanging, eight " fellow-citizens " of the United States, for 
no other cause than maintaining that national allegiance 
which was the direct consequence and duty of their national 
citizenship. Their alleged crime was nothing else than their 
loyalty to that government to which he as well as they owed 
service, and to which he, as a military man, was specially 
bound by the most solemn superadded and voluntarily as- 
sumed oaths. They had enlisted in the Union army, and 
were thus mercilessly put to death as traitors to a traitorous 
confederacy, as rebels to a rebellion. Here is a new phase of 
this atrocious business. Treason itself may be pardoned, re- 
bellion, if it adds no other features, may be amnestied, but a 
nation that would not avenge its loyal "citizens " thus slain — 
not slain in battle, but ignominously hung for their loyalty — 
deserves the world's reproach ; it forfeits its national charac- 
ter as a power ordained of God to punish wrong, and vindi- 
cate the right. It deserves not that men should be loyal to 
it; it disowns the allegiance which it pretends to claim, yet 
cannot, or will not, protect. What hold on Southern loyalty 
should we have in any future rebellion from the same quarter. 
No amnesty should have included the perpetrator of this 
atrocious deed ; no special pardon should have extended to his 
treason that mercy which he denied to the loyalty of those 
brave men. He who hung men for their fidelity to their true 
allegiance should have felt what was due to a real traitor. 
Now this man was a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention; 
his rebel hand, thus foully stained with loyal blood, was 
grasped by Dix and Custer. He was allowed to say, " fel- 
\w? -citizens / w this murderous destructive was cheered in this 
conservative gathering, when he talked of " radicals " and 
" fanatics." He was there with full credentials, and his re- 
ception was an unmistakable sign that his associates in that 



39 



body deemed him worthy of instant admission into the na- 
tional legislature, if a majority of rebels like himself had given 
him their votes for that high place of trust. This mysterious 
doctrine of " unimpaired State rights,'' which forms the staple 
of the Philadelphia reasoning, would make such a man a fit 
law-maker for the nation whose life he had so assailed, and 
whose loyal citizens he had thus murdered on the express 
ground of their loyalty. This was the real " haulinc down 
the national flag," for doing which Gen. Dix would have " in- 
stantly" bad sbot the ignorant Southern soldier who only 
obeyed the commands of his brutal masters. It saves us an- 
other definition. It presents at once the difference between a 
real and what we have called an emblematic loyalty. 

This deed of Taylor's was far from being the only case of 
the kind. A confederate general in North Carolina hung in 
one day twenty Union men, and on the same ground of 
fidelity to the government under which they were born, and 
to which they owed the highest allegiance. It was n^t al- 
lowed with them to be an " open question." In Texas, too, in 
East Tennessee, in West Virginia, such tragedies occurred al- 
most daily. The number and names of those who thus suf- 
fered will, probably, never be fully known, but certainly there 
is no matter that more deserves the most searching congres- 
sional investigation. And thus does it become one of the 
great issues of the present political canvass. The kol dam-im, 
the " voice of bloods," if we may use the fearfully intensive 
Scriptural expression, is crying from the wilds of Texas, and 
from the mountains of Tennessee It calls for vengeance, not 
revenge, which some are ever confounding with it, but solemn, 
righteou 5 , judicial investigation with corresponding retribu- 
tion. Loud is that cry, but God alone will hear it — no na- 
tional inquiry, no official investigation will be aroused by it, 
if the government is once wholly surrendered into the hands 
of the present executive, and his zealous supporters North and 
South. It will all be left to the " unimpaired rights " of rebel- 
lions states. Soldiers of our noble volunteer armies ! These 



40 



loyal men died in their efforts to come to your aid. Can you 
ever forget them and their yet living suffering compatriots ? 
Your action at the polls must decide that solemn question. 

Such cases as these show into what a complication we are 
brought by the President's most illogical reasonings. If "his 
policy" is to be continued, he has put it out of his power, and 
out of the nation's power, to hold to accountability either 
States or individuals. As far as personal consistency is con- 
cerned, he might have held a high theory of State dig- 
nity, and yet have vindicated the national justice and the 
national honor. If they could not rebel as States, if they 
were ever ideally loyal as States, however strange that might 
seem in point of fact, then he might have demanded their 
action against rebellious individuals, and, on failure or refusal, 
have treated them as mobs and insurrections, or as States 
under the power of mobs and insurrections, having their forms 
of government usurped by them, and so constitutionally held 
them by martial rule (and, in that case, martial protection) 
until the riotous individuals had all been ejected from their 
usurped places, the ringleaders judicially treated, and a true 
loyalty brought out from its idealism into actual and rightful 
possession of the State power. This would have been the pro- 
ceeding of a statesman and a patriot, though having a high, 
and even an excessive, theory of State rights. In this way, 
too, if patriotism and nationality had been among his control- 
ing principles of action, he might have preserved the national 
honor and the national integrity, as well as his own consis- 
tency, to say nothing of fidelity to the great loyal party to 
whom he was indebted for all his power, whether for good or 
evil. But there are other considerations, and those, too, con- 
sistent with the best aspects of a true States' rights doctrine. 
If they were real States, such as this theory demands, then 
they could rebel as States. If they could rebel as States, then 
they could be punished as States. If they were high cor- 
porate persons, owing allegiance as such, then, on the breaking 
of that allegiance, they could incur forfeitures in the same 



41 



capacity. This se^ms to be demanded by the very idea of 
State dignity. Let us present the only three possible views of 
State relation. If, in the first place, they were merely municipal 
districts, greater in jurisdiction, but thy same in kind as cities 
and counties, then the question is easily disposed of. If mobs 
and insurrections break out in such districts, those mobs may 
be quelled, their leaders punished, and the district reorganised 
as expediency and the national will may demand. If, secondly, 
they are actual sovereignties, bound by an outward 1 sague to 
other sovereignties, then, on their breaking that league, they 
may be either let go, or they may be coerced to its observance. 
This would follow even on the extreme Calhoun doctrine ; but 
even then this ultra theory of leagued sovereignties, false as it 
is, would n&t warrant the absurd Philadelphia platform. On 
coercion for breaking their contract, or treaty with oilier sov- 
ereignties, they are not brought back to its observance with 
" unimpaired rights," but with such new terms and new con- 
ditions as the laws of war and of nations allow to be imposed. 
They may be required to pay the expenses of the war ; there 
may be demanded of them the banishment of individuals ; they 
may be even declared annexed or conquered. But if, third!//, 
what we call States are somewhere between these two extreme 
views, then are they, at the highest, political personalities, not 
simply bound by a league to, but owing, in common with 
others, a true allegiance to, a higher political personality, 
which is not a mere aggregate of these lower corporations, but 
a true historical being, of which they are the organization, or 
the form, but not the organizing power ; — that organizing 
power residing in a "people" or nationality lying back of all, 
and making a sovereignty not simply over States, and claiming 
allegiance merely from States as such, but over all individuals 
in those States, and claiming allegiance from every man of 
them in the exercise of all those powers to which such whole 
people or nationality has constitutionally limited itself, and 
which it may constitutionally diminish or enlarge. Still, by 
such organization as aforesaid, the underlying States may be 

4* 



42 



regarded as political personalities, thus distinguished from 
mere municipal districts on the one hand, or leagued sovereign- 
ties on the other. This is our State system, or form of na- 
tional organization. If, however, they are thus restricted 
political personalities, then they, too, as such political corpora- 
tioLs, owe a true allegiance to the higher national personality 
as well as the individual personalities of whom they are com- 
posed. All allegiance implies accountability, with liability to 
penalty and forfeiture for its breach. Otherwise we run into 
the utter political absurdity that the parts of a nation, whether 
individual or corporate persons, may be guilty of any disorder, 
endangering the life of the whole, and, on the forcible quelling 
of such disorder, relarse immediately into their former state, 
with no rights impaired, repelling every remedial method 
made necessary by such disorder, and treating as a wrong the 
demand of any security against future danger, except their own 
assertion, however made, that, for the present, they resist no 
more. In such a case the seeming coercion ip, in fact, non- 
coercion ; it is not carried out ; nothing is effected by it ; it 
had better never have been begun ; if accompanied by a great 
sacrifice of life, it is a folly and a crime. 

It all amounts, then, to this : If they are corporate per- 
sons they have corporate liabilities. As said before, the very 
dignity of the State idea, if it have any dignity, demands this. 
If so, then they may commit treason, which is, in its essence, a 
violation of allegiance. If they could commit treason, then 
they could incur, and did incur, the forfeitures and conse- 
quences of treason, although their corporate being rendered 
them incapable of suffering some of its specific penalties as 
they may be inflicted' on individuals. Civil death is one of 
these consequences of treason, whether as committed by indi- 
viduals or corporations. It is, in fact, both a penalty and a 
consequence. Such civil death results directly from the idea 
of breach of allegiance, as separation from a common national 
life. This can happen to States. If they cannot be hung by 
the neck like individual traitors, their political life may be sws- 



43 



pended, and is of itself suspended, by the very act of treason — 
that is, the withdrawal of allegiance. If, then, this political 
life comes into them again, it must be from the action of the 
great national body in which, as a whole, the life still remains 
unimpaired in the fountain and principle of its vitality, and 
which, as before proved, is pre-eminently represented in the 
great national Legislature. 

AA e hope the reader will pardon this dry argumentation. 
The great principle for which we contend could not well be 
set forth in briefer or less abstract terms. But waiving all 
this, and supposing that the President, for any reason, could 
not see his way in this direction, then he had a clear course 
in the other. Taking his own theory, so inconsistent with his 
other notions of State power and State dignity, so inconsistent, 
too, with actual facts, namely, that no action of a State could 
affect its relation to the Union — that it was never out, how- 
ever solemnly it had declared itself to be out — that it had never, 
as a State, made war upon the nation, however explicitly and 
in all its corporate action, legislative, judicial, and conven- 
tional, it had declared and carried on such war — suppose we 
admit that as States they ever continued, regularly and har- 
moniously, in all their rights and relations to the Union, and 
that all that took place were the acts of mobs and insurrec- 
tions under which those ever loyal States were suffering, even 
as Massachusetts, to which the President so illogically com- 
pared them, suffered from Shay's rebellion — suppose, I say, we 
admit all this, strange as it seems, and allow that everything 
done was done by individuals with only individual liabilities, 
although these individuals comprised all the governors, all the 
judges, all the legislators, all persons holding positions in the 
organic machinery of these strange nondescript bodies — what 
then ? Why, surely, as " treason must be made odious," these 
individuals, or at least the worst among .them, should have 
been held liable for treason. They should have been reached 
in some way, and if this could not have been done through 
the State organizations, or through the judiciary therein 



44 



(whether called State or National), on account of sympathy 
with them, then they should have been treated as mobs still, 
and other and loyal organizations put in their places. 

The whole of the President's difficulty is solved by the 
plain distinction, before made, between the Nation and the 
Union as the form of its organization. It is also disposed of 
by the unanswerable argument drawn from the fact that each 
one of the rebellious States had broken its own constitution, if 
it be a sound principle that the national constitution is a part, 
and an essential part, of the constitution of each State. But 
waiving all this, we say again, why not proceed against them 
as individuals — why not, in some way, " make treason odi- 
ous ? " Now here presents itself again the strange complica- 
tion that comes directly from these illogical ideas. It is the 
monstrous shifting of responsibility till it lodges no where, and 
no body can be touched. Were these States all this time, 
full, lawful States, or lawless mobs? They must not be States 
for one purpose and mobs for another — mobs when the at- 
tempt is made to hold the State to its forfeitures and its lia- 
bilities, and then States again when the individual actors in 
these mobs and insurrections want to interpose State author- 
ity and State allegiance as their shield. It was supposed that 
though it might be false there was really some dignity in this 
doctrine of State rights, so that a man might hold it and yet 
have some claim to reason and respectability. It was thought 
there was some chivalry about it, but as thus used, what a 
miserable skulking thing it is ! Look at the pitiable position 
of Alexander H. Stephens. Do you hold, sir, that the State of 
Georgia was out of the Union ? By no means, is the reply. 
The State could not be legally out of the Union, and, there- 
fore, it was not out of the Union. What a sudden conversion 
this, of these once nation-reviling conspirators, to the new 
Johnsonian doctrine ! But who made the war then ? As the 
State could not be legally out of the Union, and must there- 
fore, be supposed to have maintained unimpaired its loyal re- 
lations to the Union, the irregularities referred to can only be 



45 



regarded as the unauthorized acts of mobs or individual-. 
Very well, sir, but now another question. Were you, as an 
individual, guilty of treason .' Xot at all. The State of 
Georo-ia held to the riojht of secession; its inhabitants, in- 
eluding myself, still hold to it, although we do not mean to 
assert it just now, and what T did was by virtue of my al- 
legiance to a sovereign State. It was therefore not treason 
against the United States. Who can understand it ? The 
representation, so far as it can be put into words at all, would 
seem to be something like this. Back of all the mobs and 
turbulence stands the ideal State as fair as ever. Actually, 
its governor is the head of a most violent insurrection against 
the national authority ; ideally he is head of a political body 
the harmony of whose relations to the great republic has 
never been impaired, and which holds its place the same, at 
all times, without terms or conditions. But are you and 
others then, guilty of treason } Iu answer to this question, 
there instantly vanishes the mob w r hich had so strangely rep- 
resented this abstract corporation. The State itself now 
emerges from its idealism, and under it the mob and all the 
actors in the mob, from Vice-President Stephens down, im- 
mediately take shelter. Shall a great nation be juggled in 
this way ? Shall a quarter of a million of our noblest men 
have died and no other result come from it than such a 
thimble-rigging farce as this! The cruelties of Andersonville 
shock us more, but the pain they occasion is less than the 
feeling that hence arises, of our utter natioual humiliation. 

This complication is coming widely into view, and bids 
fair, unless soon untied, to make infinite confu-ion in future 
judicial proceedings. Take again the case of Dick Taylor 
aforesaid, or that of the North Carolina general, who hung 
twenty loyal Union men. Suppose these persons indicted for 
murder, to say nothing of the crime of treason. The blood they 
have thus shed cries to heaven, and orphan children are ask- 
ing justice against the slayers of their innocent parents. 
There is the form of an arraignment, when lo ! there is pro- 



46 



duced on the trial, the orders of a confederate governor, or 
the warrant of a confederate general, and all this sanctioned 
by confederate sovereign States, whose acts, during all the 
time of the rebellion, must be held to be as legitimate as be- 
fore and after ; for they were never out of the Union, and 
their rights in it were never in the least impaired. Add to 
this the doctrine of Judge Ruffin, lately ratified by a popular 
vote in North Carolina, that no acts, or conventions, or pro- 
ceedings of any kind, that were forced upon them by military 
or any outside authority have any validity, and we have a 
state of political confusion unexampled in the annals of the 
world. If they were simply mobs and insurrections, then 
Gen. Lee, and every man in his army, were each liable to in- 
dictment of murder for every Union soldier slain, of arson for 
every building burned, of robbery for every article of property 
taken or destroyed. But who expects them ever to be found 
guilty on any such indictments, or to be punished in any way, 
if the President's policy is carried out, and this mysterious 
doctrine of State rights is allowed to shift from the actual to 
the ideal, or from the ideal to the actual, in any way that may 
be required to shield crime on the one hand, or to get rebels 
into Congress on the other ? The pleas of which we speak 
have been already offered and received in Southern courts. 
Many more such will be offered, and the result will be that 
by means of this wretched juggle, no man however guilty will 
be punished ; no man as well as no State will find any rights 
impaired, or any wrongs imputed whatever crimes he may 
have committed. 

Now, aside from the political inconsistency, such a state of 
things as this is most demoralizing. It is a shocking, and a 
consequent benumbing, of the national conscience. The health- 
ful preservation of the great ideas of right and wrong, of the 
eternal distinction between truth and falsehood, of the sanctity 
of the national oath, of the feeling that such a great right and 
truth were involved in our national struggle, is a higher thing, 
a more precious thing, than any amount of sentimental con- 



4; 



ciliation, whatever guise of charity it may assume, The moral 
sense is hurt, and, in time, becomes diseased, by the sight of 
guilt, especially great guilt, going about unpunished. This is, 
in fact, the ultimate ground of punishment in human law as 
representative of the divine. It is deeper than all the policies 
and expediencies that are usually urged as the only penal 
sanction. Call penal justice utilitarian if you will, but then 
the production and preservation of a healthy social conscience 
is the highest earthly utility. Guilt unpunished is ever de- 
moralizing. It is still more demoralizing when some punish- 
ments are inflicted, but with that gross inequality which 
shocks instead of admonishing. "When, for example, a miser- 
able Clamp Ferguson writhes upon the gallows as a guerrilla, 
whilst his clerical instructor in rebellion is admitted into. 
Christian pulpits, and his 'military commanders, whom he 
thought he was zealously serving in his irregular mode of war, 
are lionized at Philadelphia conventions ; or when the poor, 
stolid, brutal-tempered Wirtz is executed for crimes almost 
forced upon him by his position, whilst men who placed him 
there, and kept him there, are regarded as eligible to Cong: 
and the right of rebellious States to send them there is pro- 
nounced unbroken and " unimpaired." 

It is a plea often used in palliation of Southern treason, 
that thev were " educated" in the doctrine of State sovereign tv, 
and that they should, therefore, be judged from this their own 
" stand-point." The answer to it is, that the men for whom 
such plea is specially made were not so much the educated 
in this idea as they were themselves the educators. It might 
have some force as offered for that debased class comm«:>nly 
called the " poor whites;'' but it is a mean hypocrisy when 
used in behalf of such men as Stephen.-, Wise, and On-. For 
long years had they directed all their efforts to instill this po- 
litical poison into the Southern mind. Secession, and the 
extreme State rights doctrine out of which it arose, is not a 
natural American growth either North or South. Born cf 
Southern sectionalism, even as that was born of the exo'ic 



4S 



slavery, it took long years, and the favoring fact of a pecu- 
liarly ignorant population, to make it grow. The national 
idea, on the other hand, was the true American plant. It 
showed itself as an organizing power, even before our history 
had shaped the nation into its more regular growth and form. 
It was born of our Anglo-Saxon nationality. We see its pro- 
gress, drawing the wide-sparse districts closer together, in the 
French and Indian wars, in the early American Congresses, 
and in other acts that preceded the revolution. These were 
emphatically American Congresses, for they showed the ger- 
minal nation, even before the umbilical cord was severed that 
bound us to our historic mother. For the preservation of this, 
as mucli as for separation from Great Britain, was the battle 
fought. It was never meant to lose that binding idea, the 
w r ant of which would have rendered the struggle, in other re- 
spects, a mischief instead of a blessing. The parts were ac- 
knowledged, but that only rendered all the more precious that 
from which these rights of the parts have all their meaning. 
It w r as those most precious " State rights " which the dema- 
gogue does not understand, or undervalues for the mere petty 
local power, U which alone he gives the name. It was that 
higher right of every colony, of every State, and of the people 
of every State, in every other State, — that right of unimpaired 
citizenship throughout the wide Anglo-Saxon American terri- 
tory. It was this, too, or its more perfect security, for which 
the Constitution of 1787 was formed. The great thing wanted 
was the more perfect equalization everywhere of the valuable 
and acknowledged rights of every part in every part, and iu 
the whole, so that there might be no local legislation on mat- 
ters in which all had an interest, or that would make a man 
less a man, less a citizen, with less of the rights of a citizen, in 
one portion than in another. These higher State rights de- 
manded a general guardianship against the narrow, local, sec- 
tionalizing State rights doctrine which, while jealous for the 
corporate, is most likely to be regardless of the individual lib- 
erty. We see this plainly now — how much more favorable to 



49 



the individual freedom is the larger jurisdiction, and how it has 
to struggle to preserve it against the local power.* If conserv- 
atism is the standing firm, by the fundamental and distinguish- 
ing idea of a government, then he among us is the true con- 
servative who is the most national, and, at the same time, 

* This may be made clear by a brief analysis. In our beautiful 
yet complicated structure of government there arise five species of 
rights. 1st, the rights of the nation ; 2d, the rights of the States in 
the nation ; 3d, the rights of the States in each other ; 4th, the rights 
of the States in their local jurisdictions ; 5th, last of all, yet the most 
precious of all, or that for which all the rest exist, the right of the in- 
dividual in the State, in the nation, and in both to be unhindere'd in 
the attainment of any place, franchise, or benefit which the powers 
that God has given him niay enable him to attain, and on the same 
terms, be they high or low, and on the same conditions on which they 
are allowed to be attained by any other individual in the State, or in 
the nation ; in other words, perfect political equality. 

It is certainly a remarkable fact, that whilst in the republican striv- 
ings in Europe the tendency is strongly toward such acknowledgment 
of the rights of the individual, as the ultimate political aim, here, on 
the other hand, there are held doctrines, and those, too, called demo- 
cratic, which tend directly the other way, making f ,he preservation of 
certain corporate rights a higher thing (a more democratic thing the}' 
would say) than the very end for which those corporations have any 
value. Attorney-General Speed, in his paper of resignation, admir- 
ably presented this idea of the higher value of the individual right; 
and it is to be hoped that a thought so old, and yet so new, may be- 
come a leading principle in our politics, not to be put out by anv 
efforts of a false democracy. 

The common, noisy, undefined, and incapable-of-being-defined 
States rights doctrine stands equally opposed to the rights of the na- 
tion and the rights of the individual. This comes from au instinctive 
conviction on the part of its advocates that the broad shield of the 
one is the great security of the other, as against local tyranny or local 
prejudice; and that in a republican land, what they call centraliza- 
tion is the very reverse of what goes under the same name in a despot- 
ism ; that it is, in fact, the diffusing power, the equalizing power 
sending out liberty and securing liberty to every part. Hence their, 
evil jealousy and their fa^e logic; hence, too, their utterly undemo- 
cratic position. 

5 



50 



most strenuous for individual rights. Never was there a 
greater anomaly presented in the history of political philosophy 
than the manner in which, through the abused name of cen- 
tralization — totally misapplied from its French or European 
use — the lower has tended to displace the higher, and the petty 
claims of locality, or of indefinable corporate abstractions, have 
been urged to the damage of the rights of the States in 
each other. Among these is the interest of each State in the 
institutions of every other, and the corresponding right to de- 
mand that those institutions be equal and republican. It was 
for this, and to secure the rights of individuals, both in the 
States respectively and in the w r hole, that the present Consti- 
tution was solemnly ordained by, and in the name of the 

PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES. 

This is the true Conservatism. It is the reverse doctrine 
that is destructive of our fundamental national idea. The 
" endangered liberties of the States" — this cry of the dema- 
gogue has come to mean little else than the liberty of tramp- 
ling upon liberty, or the liberties of oligarchical States to 
infringe upon the liberties of individuals, and, in so doing, to 
make war upon the most precious liberties of other States, as 
well as upon the most sacred rights of the nation. But, whatever 
be the nature of this doctrine of State sovereignty, these men 
for whom it is now plead as a palliation were themselves its 
teachers. They were the educators. They controlled Legis- 
latures and Conventions by it. The ignorant rebellious com- 
munities which they had thus educated obeyed them, instead 
of their obeying their States. The plea, we say, might do for 
the deluded masses whom they pressed into their armies; but 
how utterly false and base it is when made by such men as 
Stephens, Wise, and Lee, or when they sutler their friends at 
Philadelphia to make it for them. 

Mobs to go out, and States to come back. 

States to go out, and mobs to come back — 
Take it either way you please, according as the application or 
the purpose demands. We have already remarked upon some 



51 



of tbese. In the case of Mr. Alex. II. Stephens, this double- 
headed monstrosity goes both ways at once. It might be 
treated as a political farce were it not for some awfully serious 
questions to which it gives rise. Among these there is none 
of deeper interest, or more directly entering into the present 
canvass, than that which relates to the future fate of the 
Southern loyalists. They have been resisting mobs, for which, 
it was supposed, they deserved the gratitude and protection of 
the nation ; but, lo ! this mob suddenly presents itself as the 
State, the strange ideal State which has been existing all the 
time, and, now, according to the Philadelphia doctrine, comes 
forth with all its rights unimpaired, among which is the abso- 
lute right to legislate for all people within its territory, — to 
punish, banish, ostracise, or disfranchise for any crime it may 
invent, or any cause it may allege. This is one of its reserved 
inherent sovereign rights. There is, indeed, an act of Con- 
gress, called the Civil Rights Bill, which might seem to be in 
the way, but that is everywhere pronounced unconstitutional 
in Southern courts, and the Executive is in deadly hostility to 
it. "What is to protect these men ? Their case is unex- 
ampled. The nation has triumphed, it is said ; and yet they 
are worse off than if they had been disloyal. There is some- 
thing else in their condition more marvellous still. The com- 
plication into which the President's policy has brought the 
whole affair makes their situation actually more helpless and 
deplorable than though the nation had been defeated and the 
rebellion had triumphed in the field. This may seem a 
strange assertion, and we therefore proceed to prove it. In 
doing so, let us call up a fact now fifty years past in the 
history of our relations to a foreign Government. In the 
negotiations between the United States and Great Britain, 
at the close of the war of 1812, the latter made the protection 
of their Indian allies a matter of most express stipulation, 
Other things were earnestly insisted upon, offered and rejected, 
pressed at one time and yielded at another by both parties, 
but from this demand the British Government never would 



52 



recede. It was with them more than a matter of interest or 
policy. Their national honor was at stake ; the world's eye 
was upon them ; they thought how they would look in his- 
tory, and they made it a sine qua non. These Indian allies 
lived in the then wilderness territories of Michigan and Wis- 
consin. Our Government had claimed from them a quasi 
allegiance, but this was certainly something far less than the 
allegiance which bound to it Southern men, rebels or loyalist 5 , 
in 1861. They had aided Britain in her war, and she would 
not abandon them to our " unimpaired" jurisdiction without 
the fullest assurance, accompanied by positive security for their 
protection. Whatever we may think of that war, or however 
we may dislike the English nation, their conduct in this re- 
spect was just and noble. And now, how utterly reversed is 
our course, if the Johnson policy is to prevail, and that, too, 
not with Indians having, perhaps, a doubtful claim, but with 
men, citizens of the United States, distinguished above all for 
their loyalty and their sufferings. To make this clear let us 
picture in imagination a state of things which, three or four 
years ago, was far from being impossible, or even improbable. 
There were times in our great struggle when the boldest 
hearts grew faint. It did seem, sometimes, as though the 
great point would have to be conceded, and the Southern 
secession acknowledge* 1. In such a case we could not have 
abandoned these Southern loyalists. The world would have 
cried out against us. Though yielding other things, here we must 
have insisted to the last; and, for the sake of acknowledged 
independence, the South would, doubtless, have accepted the 
terms, and given such security, whether by way of territorial host- 
age or otherwise, as would have been, by the law of nations, an 
adequate protection against all liability or deprivation of 
rights. Bitterness, it may be, would have existed against 
them, but the dread of another war, which we could not have 
refused to wage on violation of such a treaty, would have 
secured quiet and tolerance, even a tolerance which the trans- 
actions at Memphis and New Orleans show to be now 



53 



unknown. How strange the spectacle! How astounding 
the paradox which we now present, especially to the lovers 
of freedom abroad, and which comes directly from this most 
unheard-of "policy," and this most mysterious doctrine of 
"unimpaired State rights."' Our national armies triumphant, 
rebellion subdued, the loyal North rejoicing, the loyal men 
of the South expecting, beyond all others, to share in 
that joy, and to partake of the benefit, even as beyond all 
others they had shared in the suffering — the President of the 
nation belonging to this very class — and yet, after all, left in 
a worse condition than though the rebellion had been success- 
ful — left in a position where every feeling is embittered 
agaiust them, and yet without the security that would have 
come from a treaty, without the security that Great Britain 
insisted upon for her Indian allies ! "What the horrois of that 
position actually are late events have shown beyond a doubt. 
In Louisiana more union-men slain in one day of peace (so 
called) than during the whole four years of unrelenting war! 
And what is to come? "What is to set any check upon this 
Philadelphia doctrine of State rights unimpaired. They may 
make any exclusions, any disfranchisements they please of 
these suffering loyalists. They may interdict to them any 
social or political assemblings. They can persecute them in 
innumerable ways. They can consign them to civil death, 
and put it into their constitutions. They can banish them as 
enemies of the State, and there is no power on earth that can 
forbid any such proceedings. Citizenship of the United States 
cannot protect them, for the President holds that there is no such 
citizenship aside from that of the States ; and we are reasoning 
now on the ine\itable consequences of his policy if sanctioned 
by the nation at the ballot-box. And here comes up another 
monstrous anomaly, which is a legitimate result of that most 
unheard-of policy. "We fought four years, lost 250,000 
lives, and incurred a burthen of 3,000,000,000 dollars of debt, 
to vindicate our claim to be a nation ; and yet citizenship, 
ever held to be inseparable from nationality, is declared by 



54: 



our President not to belong to it. It pertains alone to the 
States. A. nation without citizens, and without power to pro- 
tect them if it had any ! Such are the doctrines of " the 
policy." Such is one of the momentous questions to be de- 
cided by the present canvass. Can it be that any loyal man 
at the North shall regard this as the true reconstruction of the 
Union after such a war ? Can it be that the soldiers of our 
noble armies, and to such throughout this appeal we have 
especially addressed ourselves — can it be that any who fought 
under Grant, and followed Sherman through the South, can 
misunderstand an issue so nearly affecting the national honor 
and their honor, knowing as they do what these Southern 
allies of theirs endured, and at what a price their loyalty was 
maintained ? It must not be, it cannot be, that a nation 
which has lost 250,000 lives in maintaining its nationality 
should be unable to protect its humblest citizens, much less 
those who are placed in positions of suffering and persecution 
from their devotion to it in its hour of sorest trial. 

" Sneaks " is the name which the Johnson newspapers are 
giving to these crushed men, and copperheads throughout the 
land are reiterating it. "Recreants" Blair calls them — re- 
creants to their own aide. Can you bear this, soldiers ? You 
see in it the progress of the new idea the President has intro- 
duced, and which becomes necessary for the support of his 
policy. There might have been some plausibility in it if 
indeed it had been a question of sides or localities instead of 
that high issue which we have endeavored to keep prominent 
in all that we have said — not a war of the North against the 
South, nor of factions " swinging round," nor a " civil war," as 
Seward calls it, but the nation ao-ainst assassins that sought 
its life — the whole nation, politically, against traitorous foes 
more hostile and more alien to it than any foreign enemies. 
This utter debasing of the whole matter to a thing of locality 
casts dishonor upon you as well as upon the suffering men to 
whom these epithets are applied. Your nationality was their 
nationality. Your love of country, and of her glorious insti- 



55 



tutions of freedom, was their love of country, only the more 
severely tested by the counter-strength of the narrower local 
feeling, and of the persecutions to which they were exposed. 

Thus, whatever view we take, whatever seemingly collateral 
point may call attention, the same great issue is ever coming 
up again. Through all complications it ever stands before us. 
The conflict is not over, soldiers ! You conquered at Gettys- 
burg, at Richmond, and New Orleans. There is yet to be 
won another battle which is to prevent all your former tri- 
umphs from having been in vain. The question now to be 
decided is the glory of the cause in which you fought. A 
mean reaction is seeking to lower it, in its attempts to rescue 
from deserved odium the men who have caused all our 
national woe. They are attempting to revive the old per- 
nicious doctiines in which secession had its birth. A false 
" policy " finds itself driven to such a course in its own 
defense. A false demoralizing sentimentality is undermining 
the higher and healthier ideas of truth and right. To the 
same end, and with a similar demoralizing effect, an emblem- 
atic loyalty is talking again of " chivalry," and "honorable 
foes," whilst offending the moral sense of all Christendom in 
its treachery to Southern loyalists, and its base abandonment 
of that crushed race whose aid we sought in the hour of our 
o-reatest dano-er. Influences like these mav draw with them 
some few who were once esteemed patriotic, but the masses in 
the opposing ranks are still the same old elements of dis- 
loyalty. They are the men who were the soldiers' foes, and 
the foes of his cause, during all the auxious years of the con- 
flict. 

Xot platforms then, as we have before remarked, but move- 
ments, tendencies, and affinities, unerring and unmistakable, 
are the things to which, as men of common sense, as wise 
men, we are to look. A few questions, which it requires only 
a moment's honest thinking to answer, settle all : "What side 
is sure to receive the vote of every warmest sympathizer with 



56 



rebellion in our land \ On which side will be found the men 
who rejoiced — and their name is legion— at defeats in our 
armies ? In whose success w r ill they feel deepest interest who 
had no tears for our gallant dead, and who stigmatized then, 
as some others are doing now, the war in which they fell as 
fanatical, false, and inglorious ? Where will they vote who 
were ever against giving the right of voting to the absent 
soldier in the camp ? Where will deserters vote, and they 
who are striving to get repealed, or declared unconstitutional 
by the courts, the laws by which such deserters were right- 
eously disfranchised ? On which side will success give most 
joy in Charleston and New Orleans ? Whose triumph will 
cause mourning to every liberty-loving republican of Europe, 
and rejoicing to every liberty-hating partisan of monarchy and 
aristocracy. Soldiers of Grant and Sherman — if these ques- 
tions can be answered in but one way — and you most surely 
know what that is — how can any of you vote on a side which 
will inevitably bring you into association with every one of 
these. 

Never was issue more sharply joined. It is not so much 
the particular names of candidates, or even the measures, how- 
ever plausibly stated, of which they profess to be the advo- 
cates, as the influences that support them, and which will be 
the controlling power in spite of all professions. Via media 
men, third party men, ever, with all their claims to conserva- 
tism, the most factious, mischief-making men in a nation, may 
profess what they please, but that which is most powerful and 
most numerous in the voting ranks will not only be predomin- 
ant, but claim full recognition of its predominance, in case of 
success. And we all know what that ruling interest is, and of 
what elements it is composed. All that is most hostile to our 
true nationality, is there. All the most extreme advocates of 
the baleful doctrine of State sovereignty are there. Every one 
among us who was a member of a secret society in aid of 
Southern treason is there. Every one who is engaged in the 



57 



ineffably vile work of creating a new sectionalism between the 
East and the West — every such man is there. All who are 
distinguished by the most demoniac feeling toward a crushed 
and disfranchised race are there. All w T ho call the loyalists of 
Louisiana and East Tennessee, " sneaks " and " recreants " are 
there. They are all there. Soldier, patriot, can you vote 
with them ? 

In order to lift themselves out of the deserved degrada- 
tion into w T hich they have heretofore fallen, all these classes 
are seeking to depreciate the character of our late war. They 
would send it down in history d inglorious and dishonored. 
They would put a stigma upon those who have been its most 
zealous supporters. In other words, they would in every way 
lower the standard of the national cause. Soldiers, be it 
yours to set it high, to put the emblematic symbol of its honor 
where no hand can ever " haul it down." Looking away then 
from all complications, from all " policies " — keeping the eye 
steadily fixed on unmistakable tendencies and results — make 
to yourselves these firm resolves : This struggle shall not have 
been in vain ; its deep grounds of righteousness shall not be 
undervalued, and its most loyal supporters reviled, that rebels 
may be relieved from deserved ignominy ; such an immense 
sacrifice of life shall not have been made merely that they 
may come back again to their abandoned seats in Congress, 
and even with an increased representation ; such hosts of our 
comrades shall not have fallen that there may be, in the re- 
bellious States, less freedom of speech, less unhindered politi- 
cal action, less protection to individual right?, than there was 
before. It shall not be that the brave Southern loyalists, given 
up to the " unimpaired rights " of such rebellious jurisdictions, 
should be in a worse condition than though they had been 
disloyal — in a worse condition even than if the rebellion had 
never been subJued. Above all, soldiers — in no unchristian 
temper of vain chivalrous boasting, but with a sober regard to 
the future spiritual and political health of the land in which 



58 



your children are to live — say with one voice : The standard 
we have borne aloft through so many battle-fields, it shall not 
be lowered — the historic glory of this our second heroic period, 
of this our second great war for nationality — IT MUST, IT 
SHALL BE PRESERVED. 



i B Ja'13 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 785 677 3 • 



